In Lie of the Day, I try not to take a side. But I just received an email from a relative and the Email I received, pretended to be about religion but had to do with politics.

Normally I just hit the delete button when I receive any Email dealing with mud slinging, half truths or out-right lies…

Let me explain something to you the reader. To understand my reaction, you need to know something about my relatives, family and friends. They are all NUTS! I receive right wingnut emails and left wingnut emails. I try to stay out of the line of fire. I just nod my head yes to which ever wingnut I’m talking with left or right. If I get caught between a right wingnut and left wingnut in the same room, I pretend not to be paying attention, hoping they will go away or at least step outside to kill each other so I do not have to watch or have blood splattered all over me…

I am not going to tell you who I plan to vote for. I will not tell you because my friends and relatives may read this blog and I do not want to give them the pleasure of knowing whether I am a rightie-tighty wound so tight that I don’t fart or a lefty-loosey who is so open minded that my brains might fall out or something in between!

The forever right wingnut strips the threads and the forever left wingnut falls off the bolt…

The Email below is the kind of crap I will take a stand on. I am posting the Email to show you the reader the kind of crap that some people pass around, trying to sell fear. I feel sorry for anyone that thinks this kind of CRAP may be true.

V See Email below V

Subject: Now this is scary!
How long is the beast allowed to have authority in Revelations?

Revelations Chapter 13 tells us it is 42 months, and you know what that is – almost a four-year term of a Presidency.

All I can say is ‘Lord, Have mercy on us!’

According to The Book of Revelations the anti-Christ is: The anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40’s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal….the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything…

Even when I take off the illusionary blinders of my culture, no real reason becomes visible that can explain why reason should prevail over fanaticism or why fanaticism should be thought of as culturally backward and something that will disappear over time.

Instead, I see myself as having been blinded by a cultural myth, blinded to the fact that the law of the jungle is very possibly stronger than reason and modernity and may win out in the long run.

Why do we have this thing called a “financial crisis”? Why have we had such a crisis periodically ever since the United States was created? What changes occur or what happens each time to bring on the crisis? Do we forget how to make things that people need? Do the factories burn down? Are our tools lost? Do the blueprints disappear? Do we run out of people to work in the factories and offices? Are all the services that people need for a happy life so well taken care of that there’s hardly any more need for the services? In other words: What changes take place in the real world to cause the crisis? Nothing, necessarily. The crisis is usually caused by changes inthe make-believe world of financial capitalism.

All these grown men playing their boys’ games. They create an assortment of financial entities, documents, and packages that go by names like hedge funds, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, index funds, credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles, subprime mortgages, and dozens of other exotic monetary vehicles. They create all manner of commercial pieces of paper, of no known real or inherent value, backed up by few if any standards. Then they sell these various pieces of paper to the public and to each other. They slice and dice mortgages into arcane and risky instruments, then bundle them together, and sell the packages to those higher up in the pyramid scheme. And some of those engaged in this Wild West buying and selling become millionaires. Some become billionaires. They get Christmas bonuses greater than what most Americans earn the entire year. Is all this not remarkable?

And much of the buying is not done with the buyer’s own money, but with borrowed funds; “leveraged”, they call it. The pieces of paper sometimes represent commodities, but the actual commodities are not seen, may not even exist; if the seller demanded the buyer’s own funds, or the buyer wanted to see the goods, the whole transaction would freeze. They sell “long”, expecting the price to rise; they sell “short”, expecting the price to fall; they sell “naked short”, which means they neither possess nor own what they’re selling; a name for each gimmick. They take ever-greater risks buying and selling increasingly-esoteric pieces of paper. It’s a glorified Las Vegas, casino capitalism.

These pieces of paper can be so complex that many of those buying and selling them do not fully understand them; no problem, they just resell the pieces of paper to someone else at a higher price, even when one or both parties know that the paper, while pretending to be payable debt, is virtually worthless. The government, even when it tries to moderately regulate this Monopoly board, can at times also be confused by the complexities of the pieces of paper, compounded by the less-than-transparent practices that envelop the transactions; a potpourri including speculation, manipulation, fraud. Billionaire financier Warren Buffett has called the pieces of paper “weapons of mass financial destruction.”

The boys of finance have been playing their games for years, and so at each stage of the process there are insurance policies allowing the players to hedge their bets; they insure, and they re-insure; hopefully covering themselves against the many risks of the game, often knowing that they’re trading in questionable debts; the giant corporation AIG, a major player in the insurance game, has just been taken over by the federal government. And with each transaction, at each level, someone earns a commission or a fee. There are also other firms whose purpose in life is to go around rating various players and their pieces of paper and their credit worthiness and giving seals of approval which are relied upon by investors. Some of these rating firms, we’re now learning, have been surprisingly incompetent, when not simply dishonest

President Roosevelt, confronted in the 1930s with similar players, called them “banksters”.

It’s all built on faith, as fragile as the religious kind, the belief that something is worth something because it comes with a piece of paper with reassuring words and numbers written on it, because it’s traded, rated, and insured, because someone will sell it and someone will buy it. The same market psychology, the same herd mentality, that went into constructing this house of cards built on pillars of greed can cause the house to collapse in a heap. But the Monopoly players keep their bonuses, and bow out with multimillion-dollar golden parachutes; while tent cities are springing up all over America.

Is this any way to run a society of human beings?

And the government is in the process of trying to bail out these reckless traders, these parasites, rescuing them and their system from their own nonsense. With our money; without a major restructuring of the Alice-in-Wonderland rules of the financial games, without instituting the toughest of regulations, oversight, and transparency, and with no guarantee that the spoiled-little-brat Masters of the Universe will act in any way other than their own narrow self interest, the rest of us be damned.

Capitalism is the theory that the worst people, acting from their worst motives, will somehow produce the most good.

I’m wondering how many people think that if something is published or recorded either in a book, a newspaper or magazine, shown in a video, broadcast on radio, ( written in a blog [smile] ) or broadcast on television – I wonder, do they think that there is somehow more truth to it?

Do you believe news on television is more reliable in the area of truth than say the spoken word?

Do you think if a book is really old that it is somehow more true than a newer book, especially relating to religious beliefs?

Say you read a story in the newspaper and then hear the same story on TV but the story’s are a bit different, say some guy is accused of hit and run on TV but the newspaper accused the mans wife? Which do believe?

Say someone tells you a book they have read is the gospel truth or say someone tells you it is the word of God, will you believe them? Do you ever wonder how it is that they would know this as fact?

Do you think if more people believe something that that somehow makes what they believe more true, i.e. that the majority is somehow more right?

Remember at one time everyone thought the world was flat and it was only one man who said it was round. Now, you would be thought of as an idiot if you really thought the world was flat. Yet how do you know that many hundreds of years from now, people might not disprove and find laughable some belief everyone now-a-days currently believes to be true? Or, is it possible that people in the future will be the deluded ones, in which case, are you really sure the world is round?